Visual sensing is seeing: Why “mindsight,” in hindsight, is blind

ABSTRACT—Faced with the surprising failure to notice large changes to visual scenes (change blindness), many researchers have sought evidence for alternative, nonat-tentional routes to change detection. A recent article in Psychological Science (Rensink, 2004) proposed a new, nonsensory ‘‘mindsight’ ’ mechanism to explain the finding that some subjects on some trials reported sensing the presence of a recurring change before they could explicitly identify it and without having a localizable visual experi-ence of change. This mechanism would constitute a previ-ously unknown mode of seeing that, as Rensink suggested, might be akin to a sixth sense. Its existence would have radical implications for the mechanisms underlying con-sciousvisual experience.Provocative claimsmerit rigorous scrutiny. We rebut the existence of a mindsight mechanis